Black Spaces

African Diaspora in Italy

Heather Merrill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351000734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Black Spaces examines how space and place are racialized, and the impacts on everyday experiences among African Italians, immigrants, and refugees. It explores the deeply intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, and how people of African descent negotiate, contest, and live with anti-blackness in Italy. The vast majority of people crossing the Mediterranean into Europe are from West Africa and the Horn of Africa. Their passage is part of the legacy of Italian and broader European engagement in colonial projects. This largely forgotten history corresponds with an ongoing effort to erase them from the Italian social landscape on arrival. Black Spaces examines these racialized spaces by blending a critical geographical approach to place and space with Afro-Pessimist and critical race perspectives on the lived experiences of Blackness and anti-blackness in Italy.

1

Africa-Italy

A Genealogy of Relational Places

At the end of Adua, Igiabo Scego’s haunting novel about Italian colonialism and its afterlife, the Somali-Italian protagonist and the book’s namesake is offered the gift of a video camera by her Somali refugee husband who tells her, “Now you can film what you wish, now you can narrate what you see and like” (Scego 2015).¹ This moment marks a subjective denouement in the novel, signaling that after decades living in Italy, Adua finally has the tools she needs to communicate and record her own story. Her name, which represents Italy’s colonizing project and Africa’s first fully-fledged anti-imperial victory against a European army at Adua Ethiopia in 1896, suggests that she is courageous and resilient in the face of power. Yet to this point in her life, Adua has been unable to come to terms with and narrate her own reflected being, a life grounded in intersecting memories and experiences from a number of different places and times.

In Scego’s story, Adua reflects on her early life in post-colonial Somalia; the intersections between her own experiences and those of her father in his entanglements with Italian Fascism and colonialism in “Italian east Africa,” and the current moment when so many refugees from Somalia and other places are lost in the sea while en route to “safe ground” in Europe. When her husband, whom she calls “Titanic” because he survived a sinking ship and who represents the newest generation of Somalis in Europe, hands her a camera, Adua is finally given a chance to record what she knows from her own perspective. Hers is a complex subjectivity informed by the profoundly intertwined histories of Italy and Somalia. Scego’s novel elegantly depicts the complexity of lived experiences in the postcolonial African diaspora, underscored by manifold differences and collective affinities (Scego 2015).

As geographer Camilla Hawthorne notes, Scego’s story is a meditation on the lived experiences of Italian colonial history and its legacies of violence and intimacy (Hawthorne 2015). In the early years of her life in Magalo, a small city on the Indian Ocean, Adua is inspired and seduced by images of freedom and adventure in Italy. In Magalo she walks along avenues lined with Italian architecture; she frequents Italian groceries and cafes; attends Italian mission schools; and marvels at American films shown in the local theater, while imagining herself as a Somalian Marilyn Monroe or Ginger Rogers. When she receives an invitation from an Italian couple and film production duo to star in Italian films, she is lured away from her unhappy childhood to Rome in the l970s and into a world where she is degraded by performing the European stereotype of a sexualized and exotic African woman, or what Robin Kelley describes as “the fabrication of the Negro” (Kelley 2000).² Scego, one of Italy’s foremost contemporary writers, depicts Adua’s multifaceted life as she moves between memories of her father’s experiences of racial brutality and hostility in Fascist Italy while acting as a translator in Rome and Ethiopia prior to the second Italian occupation in 1935. Adua reflects on her childhood in Somalia in the immediate aftermath of Italian colonialism there; her arrival in Italy in the l970s and exploitation of her vulnerability as a young woman; and the present moment when many Somalis endure traumatic journeys while crossing North Africa and the Mediterranean in order to find asylum in Europe. Her husband is a much younger man from Somalia, a refugee whom Adua rescues from homelessness and nurtures back to health in body and mind. His strength restored with her support, Adua’s husband is able to confront the enormous challenges of rebuilding his life in Europe. Nevertheless for Adua, whose dreams of becoming a film star and ability to claim her life have been suppressed, the marriage enables her to acquire the recognition she needs in order to assert her place in an Italy-Africa. Scego’s novel demonstrates quite poignantly, as Hawthorne writes, that “Africans” are not foreign “others” intruding into bounded Italian space (Hawthorne 2015). Instead the interweaved, and as Fernando Coronil suggests contrapuntal histories between Italy and Africa precede Italy’s official transformation into a country of immigration beginning in the late 1970s, “Challenging an imperial order requires overturning the Self-Other polarity that has served as one of its foundational premises. This requires that cultures be seen, as Ortiz and Said propose, in contrapuntal relation to each other rather than taken to be autonomous units.” (Coronil 1996, 73). Their boundaries should not be assumed.

In this chapter, my primary goal is to examine the profound relationality of Italy and Africa; how the familiarity, violence, and mythologies of Italian colonialism in Africa inform African disaporic identities. Italian colonialism connected Italians and Africans dialectically, producing identities that gain meaning in relation to each other. If national identities were built as multiple and porous, this is not how they have been depicted in Italian popular consciousness dialogues. To understand these spaces of relationality I examine texts and photographs for evidence of the inner lives of humans.

My discussion is brief and exploratory, focused on Italian colonization in Asmarina (Eritrea/Ethiopia), Libya, and Somalia from the end of the 19th century through mid 20th century. Locating Africa-Italy as a relational place is not a simple endeavor. The materials at my disposal are limited, in part because they are generally written from a perspective that seeks neutrality or to critique Italian colonialism while remaining situated in Eurocentric paradigms focused on Italian interests. Still, I ask what might have been experienced and emerged in intercultural contacts and encounters. Our frameworks have tended to be unidirectional, focused on national interests and the greater diffusion of the capitalist economy including markets, without considering how colonized and colonizers generated irrevocable interdependencies.

Frantz Fanon maintained that colonialism rendered any real recognition and reciprocity between colonizer and colonized impossible. No such recognition was possible in the colonial situation where the master did not perceive the colonized as human.³ Fanon disputed Hegel’s widely accepted dialectical model between master and slave as the universal human mediation of relationships of domination-subordination in which the master needs the slave’s recognition. Fanon argued instead for a “sociogenic” or cultural perspective on colonization that considered social context and power relations in all social interactions, as opposed to the presumption of an “I” as universally White. Fanon’s sociogenic perspective suggests a radical relationality of colonialism that is at once a deliberate blindness on the part of the European colonizer to (the unthinkability of) Black spaces, and also a transformation of the worlds and therefore the subjectivities of the colonized. Fanon argued that the racially hierarchical system of Western knowledge made unthinkable the colonized as part of the same human family as the colonizer. I will explore how the oppression that Europe structured by imagining itself as inclusively White was at once incomplete, resisted, and consented to.

People born in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya, which were colonized by Italy in the late l9th and through much of the first half of the 20th centuries, generally became reluctant “subjects” of the Italian empire. They were forced under circumstances peculiar to colonization to submit to cultural domination. They established colonial relationships with an occupying and at least initially foreign people and their institutions. From the moment the process of Italian colonization began to unfold, there was no turning back. Violence is a pivotal but not singular feature of colonialism. Desire, and the intersubjectivity of all human beings in practical contact, leads inevitably albeit unintentionally to transformations of place and persons. Within and surrounding the massive violence, new world views resonate with and contribute to emerging Black European diasporic subjectivities. Here, I consider what Stuart Hall described as multiple coexisting “presences,” diasporic cultures created in colonization (Merrill 2013; 2014). Hall argued that cultural change, as a consequence of contact zones, the movement of peoples, and different types of transcultural communication, is not the exception by the norm.

The common presumption that Europe made itself in its “Renaissance” and Age of Enlightenment/Age of Reason that initiated the Modern world in its various permutations is grounded in a myth. Europe was not the only historical agent in the drama of exploration, expansion, and empire. An imagined self-other, white-nonwhite polarity that predates European modernity (Jordan 2012) has become a controlling racial discourse that conceals and mutes the interactive, and interdependent relationality between individuals and places. Modernity has presumed worlds separated not just by space but also time, imposing a linear concept of time as progressive, and a geographical imagination of Africa as symbolically and materially anachronistic, distant from Europe along a scale of development and its implied value judgment of “civilization.”

As a structure, modernity requires an Other and an Elsewhere. Parts of humanity are dropped off the path of progress, silencing not only histories of the colonized but also of the West as it is subsumed in an imaginary construction and narration of itself against which the rest of the world is evaluated. The movement of global commodity flows through the transfer of finance and merchant capital that linked peoples and places across vast international borders and deeply affected practices and beliefs of all, involved all sorts of people – the merchants and ship builders, the Africans purchased as commodities and displaced, and Africans left behind (see Hartman 2007).

Rolf Trouillot argued that the massive global movement of people, capital, and goods exerted immense influence on the practices of daily life. Everyone involved conceived of themselves and the world around them, creating hybrid and diasporic identities and cultures (see Hall 2015). Forms of communication encompassed the exchange of commodities like people, horses, sugar, coffee, corn, and livestock that in their dissemination became part of local cultural economies, long forgotten as having originated elsewhere. There was of course confusion and resistance to the changes and repression, but it is important to realize that from the early years of the movement of trade and people in the Atlantic, identities became much more complexly diasporic than we have been lead to believe (Trouillot 2003).

Africa and Europe are positioned dialectically. I deploy the idea of relational place principally as a modality for exploring the diasporic worlds and subjectivities produced through Italian imperialism. I do this while challenging conventional oppositions, classifications, and boundaries by attending to geographies that are inhabited, embodied, and aesthetic. Employing empire and colonization as primary units of analysis allows for an examination of how local life worlds both escape from and are also profoundly impacted by colonization. This calls into question definitions of nation and ethnicity (Cesaire 2010; Fanon 2008; Trouillot 1997; Wilder 2015).

The Myth of Italian Innocence: Erasing Colonialism

The myth of Italian innocence has licensed avoidance of serious discussion and scrutiny of Italian colonialism in Africa. Crucially, this unofficial policy of evasion denies the profound relationships between Italy and Africa that inform the experiences and complex identities of several generations of de jure or de facto African Italian and Italian African citizens.

The silence on the Italian colonial record was deafening until the mid-1970s, when it began to be critiqued by left-leaning historians (Rochat 1978, 2005; Del Boca 2003). Until the turning point that corresponded with increasing immigration, a crucial part of the Italian story was obscured by a cultural forgetting, deliberate state repression, and the Italian cultural myth of “Italiaetta,” referencing the mildness of the Italian character and “Italiani brava gente” or the notion that Italians are good people (Del Boca 1996, 2003, 2005; Andall and Duncan 2005). In spite of opposing evidence by scholars since the 1970s, the belief that Italians were exceptional colonizers, that they were benign and welcomed by colonized in contrast with other colonizing nations, persists into the present.⁴ Knowledge of Italian genocides and concentration camps with high rates of mortality in Italian colonial Africa that were constructed prior to and as experimental predecessors to Nazi and Fascist camps of the Second World War has been repressed.⁵ The prevailing collective self-representation in histories and memoirs from the early 20th century is that Italians were victims who suffered atrocities especially in the Second World War, not victimizers who carried them out (Walston 1997; Fuller 1996).

Across the Mediterranean basin, Africa and Europe have entertained close ties for centuries if not millennia. While national territories and cultures are enacted, represented, and lived as real, so too are the relational and transnational places forged through the interactions between Africans and Europeans, most intensely during the 19th century colonial encounters. As Alessandra Di Maio maintains, the nation state is not a place of monolithic or homogenous identity, nor is it in a binary relationship with other nations. National spaces are instead comprised of diverse, multiple intersecting spaces, and the Italian nation may be considered as part of a broader “Black Mediterranean” (Di Maio 2012).⁶ Yet the formation of this multiplicity and relationality has a violent, coercive, and hierarchical history, fraught with suffering and inequality. In the commerce between Europe and Africa in raw materials, manufactured products, ideas, people, traditions, and human beings, as Aimee Cesaire argued, Europeans did not conduct themselves with respect for human dignity, or with even intellectual rigor. They were interested in domination of a monetary economy and social system, and to this end would eliminate everything that got in the way of their personal and national enrichment. Cesaire asserted that colonizers did not engage in human contact or exchange, but instead took from colonized lands and labor in a relationship of dominance and subordination (Cesaire 2010). The institutions of the colonizer were celebrated and those of the colonized denigrated or ignored. The discursive and material structure of this relationship has never been quite transformed, binding Europeans to Africans and Africans to Europeans long after the demise of colonial rule even though the enduring socio-cultural links have been repressed from active memory (Iyob 1997, 2005; Andall and Duncan 2005).

The Italian colonial record is fairly consistent with Cesaire’s critique. While Italian colonization began later than other European powers, it was situated in the broad and aggressive imperialist movements that characterized late 19th century Europe. A colonial ideology and cultural consciousness was forged in the mid-l9th century through visual and print culture. Interest in East Africa intensified after 1869 during the construction of the Suez Canal that would open the commercial and strategic importance of the Red Sea coast. The first Italian geographical society was founded in Florence in 1867, and transferred to Rome when it became the capital in 1871 (Atkinson 2003; Cerreti 1994). Dominated by diplomatic, military, political interests, and the influence of an intoxicating nationalism, the geographical society lobbied for expansion. They embarked on expeditions in Abyssinia to study African botanical and geological phenomena, but also to monitor Italian settlement there and later in North Africa and Somalia. Neapolitan elite, Milanese industrialists, merchants, and financiers agitated for aggressive expansion in North and East Africa to serve as markets for Italian commerce and homes for Italian emigrants. Post-Unification (1871) Italian school textbooks to promote literacy included many references to Africa as exotic, and images constructed from stereotypical beliefs were widely diffused at the popular scale (De Marco 1943; Novati 2005).

Geographical societies appeared in multiple Italian cities in response to the lobbying efforts of local elites, and they disseminated knowledge, including pictorial and photographic representations of Africa. The societies, founded by leading colonial advocates and geographers, were highly influential, and supported a growing eagerness to expand Italy’s geopolitical influence, an enthusiasm that intensified in the early 20th century and during fascism. Geographers collaborated with colonial authorities to identify, isolate, and rank the “races” of the regions, classifying Africans according to racial typologies, while using the self-conscious practice of science to legitimize the Italian presence and render the region more governable (Atkinson 2003).⁷

In 1885, an official Italian presence was established at the Red Sea port of Massawa. They began their effort to move into the Eritrean highlands. Ethiopian leaders sought to stop Italy’s advance through armed resistance, and Italians suffered defeats but also played on rivalries among local leaders and conscripted young men for service in the Italian military. In 1889, Emperor Menelik II agreed to allow Italians to expand their territory northward after Italy h...